Mustache Shenanigans

by Jay Chandrasekhar

  My roommate and good friend Franklin was a wealthy kid from Hong Kong whose parents owned a two-bedroom condo on the thirty-third floor of a high-rise on Lake Shore Drive. Franklin’s parents lived in Hong Kong and Toronto and had only been to the apartment four or five times in the six years they owned it. There was almost no furniture in the place, but the view of Lake Michigan was breathtaking. I was part of a tight-knit group of five guys. On weekends, four friends would sign out to my house, even though we were really going to be spending the night at Franklin’s. With my braces and fake ID, I’d buy eight cases of Michelob, which we would roll past the doorman on luggage dollies. The parties were massive, unsupervised, and glorious.

  That spring, I played the part of Tony in West Side Story. Still, the idea of acting as a job hadn’t entered my mind.

  One day in acting class, our teacher, Carla Maria Sullwold, told us about an opportunity to be extras in a film in Chicago. Carla was the head of the theater department and is the person most responsible for encouraging me to act. She was passionate and believed in our little core group of LFA actors.

  The next week, we all went down to Navy Pier to be extras in the film. The name of the film was The Color of Money, and the director was Martin Scorsese. I didn’t know who he was at the time, but I did know who Paul Newman and Tom Cruise were. The film was a sequel to The Hustler, and we played spectators at an Atlantic City pool tournament.

  I watched Scorsese, Cruise, and Newman standing in the center of the set, talking, joking, and laughing about shots and performance and whatever. They were in the most important conversation in the room, and I was dying to hear what they were saying. I wanted to be in that conversation. That was the moment when I finally thought about it—when I finally thought about a career in show business. And today, when I’m on set talking to an actor about his or her performance, I know that I’m there. I’m in that “most important” conversation.

  I actually got to meet Paul Newman—sort of. When he went to the bathroom, I followed him, pretending like I had to go too. I caught up to him, and when he looked up, there I was. I introduced myself. He was cool, but our meeting ended when a production assistant intercepted me and told me not to talk to the actors.

  In the end, I made the final cut. When Paul Newman quits the tournament, he walks by a crowd of people, and there I am, standing in front, in a coat and tie, with a look on my face that was supposed to say, “No, Fast Eddie! Why?”

  It was my first professional job, for which I was paid a dollar.

  —

  That spring at prom, we rented a suite at the Hyatt, where we partied after the dance. We had a scare when our friend Jimmy had a seizure from what I imagine was too much coke. He was on his back, convulsing, with his eyes rolling back. My friend the future valedictorian was thinking quickly when he stuck his wallet between Jimmy’s teeth to keep him from biting his tongue off. Later, the bite-marked wallet would become the hit of the weekend. That should have been the wake-up call, but since we were sixteen, it wasn’t.

  On the last day of junior year, I was getting ready to host the school talent show when my friend Mike from Little Rock, Arkansas, popped in. He said he had bought a couple of pills of this legal psychiatric drug called ecstasy, which he said they called “the love drug.” Did I want to do it at the party later? (There was an off-campus rager at a kid’s house in Lake Forest, so Mike and I planned to pack our rooms up after the show and head straight there.) I eyed the pills and said, “Sure, why not?”

  Then Mike said, “No time like the present,” and he swallowed one. I didn’t like to do anything on campus, but since the school year was over, and it was legal, I swallowed mine. (Three weeks later, MDMA would be classified as a Schedule 1 drug).

  The show started, and I was onstage cracking jokes, but I wasn’t feeling anything. That would change. Thirty minutes in, as I was introducing a rock band, whooosh! It hit me. I stood in the wings, smiling my face off, as the band played the wildly inappropriate Eric Clapton (J.J. Cale) song “Cocaine.” There were parents and teachers at that show. I don’t know what the band was thinking. I don’t know what any of us were thinking.

  After the show, Mike and I headed back to the dorm to pack—it was a fun pack. Halfway through, one of our teachers stuck his head in to tell us that it was too late to leave and that we should just stay there for the night. I assured him that we were signed out to my house and that we’d be done soon.

  He disappeared, and ten minutes later, the headmaster walked in. “Sorry, fellas, I’m shutting you down. You’re staying in your rooms tonight.”

  I politely explained the situation, but he said he didn’t care. His decision was made.

  Mike lost it, throwing down a towel and screaming, “This is fucking bullshit!” before disappearing down the hall. Now, you have to understand: We were seventeen, school was over, and the biggest party of the year was happening less than five miles away. We really wanted to go. But I could tell we had a losing hand, so I calmly told the headmaster that we were sorry and we’d be fine to stay there for the night. Though we didn’t know it at the time, this was the beginning of a cascading series of events that would rock our senior years.

  That summer I worked for a couple of weeks valeting cars at an antiques show. Flush with a few hundred in cash, my new girlfriend, Lyssa, and I went downtown to the Hard Rock Cafe to have lunch. Afterward, on our way to my car, a guy approached.

  “Hey, wanna buy a video camera?” You know, I actually did. Watching Scorsese work had put a bug in my head. Did I know that I wanted to be a filmmaker? An Indian kid from the Chicago suburbs? Naw. That wasn’t realistic. But still, it might be fun to shoot stuff.

  The guy introduced himself as Leon, and he told me that his friend worked in a camera store that had stocked too many of last year’s model of Sony cameras. He needed to get rid of them to make room for the new ones, so he could get me a great deal—$300 for a $1,000 camera.

  I negotiated. “How about two hundred?”

  Leon rubbed his chin. “That’s a thousand-dollar camera! Two seventy-five!”

  “Two twenty. Take it or leave it.” Hardball.

  Leon’s finale: “Shit, I’m barely makin’ a profit, but okay, fine. Meet me here tomorrow at one P.M. and we’ll do the deal.” We shook hands and exchanged numbers.

  The next morning, my mom woke me up, nervous. “Jay! There’s a . . . Leon on the phone for you? He says you’re buying a . . . video camera?”

  I jumped off the couch and grabbed the phone as Mom looked on, worried. Leon was all business. “We on for one o’clock?”

  “I’ll be there,” I said, and I hung up.

  Mom jumped right in. “Don’t buy a stolen camera! I’ll buy you a camera if you want one.”

  “Mom, I’m not! I earned this money. I want to buy my own camera. It’s totally legal.”

  Since arguing with a seventeen-year-old when he’s made up his mind is a waste of time, she gave up.

  When I got downtown, I parked on the street, where Leon was already waiting. “You got the money?”

  I patted my pocket. “Where’s the camera?”

  He motioned me over to his car, where he popped his trunk. There it was—a brand-new Sony video camera in a box. I handed him the money, but as I reached for the camera he stopped me. “Pop your trunk. Let’s make this fast.” Leon grabbed the camera, quick walked to my car, and put it into my trunk. As he slammed it shut, a siren wailed off in the distance. Leon looked up as though the siren was for us. “We better move.”

  I headed straight to Van’s house, where we laid the box on his bed and started tearing away the packaging. The images of the camera that were on the box fell away. They were just cutout pictures. The box was blank.

  “That’s weird,” Van said.

  “Eh, it might just be how they . . . Maybe they rebox it when they put it in the store,” I
said, as though that made sense.

  We opened the blank box and started scooping out packing peanuts. Then Van pulled out a brick. “What the hell?”

  I held on. “They probably just do that to keep everything weighted correctly on the truck.”

  He kept digging, and then he pulled out another brick—and then two more.

  I sat there on the bed with the empty box, the packing peanuts, and four bricks, dumbfounded. It felt like the scene in The Sting, after Redford and Newman “shoot” each other and then pop up alive, signaling the con no one saw coming. In this case, I had been the mark. My first attempt at becoming a filmmaker had not gone well.

  When I told my dad what had happened, he shook his head. “If it’s too good to be true, it’s not true.”

  —

  In the summer before my senior year, I swung by school to say hi to my history teacher, Mr. Turansky. Turansky was a phenomenal teacher, certainly the best I’ve ever had. When teaching about the French Revolution, he delighted in telling us that since we were children of the elite, our heads would have been on pikes in 1789 France. While we were talking, my headmaster walked by, and then, a few seconds later, he doubled back. “Hey, can we have a chat? My office?”

  Sitting across the desk from me, my headmaster dropped the bomb. “I know that you and your friends are snorting cocaine.”

  Whoa! What the hell? He had no proof of that! “I’ve never done cocaine in my life!” I said, defensively.

  “That’s not what I hear.”

  “Well, that’s an unbelievable accusation. What proof do you have?”

  He shrugged. “Perception is reality.” That steamed me. Was this America? “Your friends are gone.”

  I looked at him, not comprehending. “Mike McGuire?” (Mike from Little Rock.)

  “I didn’t invite him back.”

  Measured, but angry. “Why not?”

  “Because he had bad grades . . . and he’s doing cocaine.”

  “He’s never done cocaine in his life!” I lied.

  “And your friend Van, he’s got a decision to make. It’s either rehab or he’s gone.” I was in shock. Van really had never done cocaine. Sure, he had bad grades, but it was because he spent study hall socializing.

  The headmaster nodded. “Your grades saved you this time, but trust me, we’re watching and we’re going to catch you.” I walked out.

  I immediately drove to Van’s house, where he told me that he was leaving LFA and enrolling in Catholic school. Just like that, our gang of five, who were so ready to have the best senior year ever, had been reduced to three.

  When school started in the fall, I was more careful, but not much more. One weekend, we signed out to my house but stayed downtown at my roommate Aaron’s, where we threw a party. On the train back to Lake Forest, I headed to the snack car to grab a coffee. At the other end of the car, walking toward me, three years after I had narc’d on him, was none other than Shinobu Takemura. He had a crew cut from the military school that I had made him go to. We approached. As we stood there, face-to-face, in the aisle of the speeding train, my first thought was: Does he know martial arts?

  I spoke first. “Shinobu, I am so sorry—”

  Shinobu interrupted. “No, I sorry. I so sorry.” Then, in a crushing moment, he Japanesed it, going down to his knees and touching my feet in a gesture of apology and respect.

  I needed to stop this. “No, man, I was wrong. I smoke pot now.”

  Shinobu stood up, strong. “No pot. Never pot!”

  He wasn’t getting it, so I mimed smoking a joint. “Me. I smoke pot.”

  His denial was intense. “No! Never! Never!” He still didn’t get it. Did he think I was mocking him? I needed to explain to him that I now liked drugs, so I pretended to snort a line of coke. “Me! Cocaine!”

  Shinobu almost exploded. “Me! No cocaine! No pot! No! No!”

  This was going nowhere, so I just said, “I’m sorry, man, sorry.” But I knew that my apology was lost in translation.

  —

  In October 1985, the Chicago Bears, in the cockiest move in American sports history, released their video, The Super Bowl Shuffle, three months before the Super Bowl was to be played. The Bears practiced in Lake Forest, but the media attention was so overwhelming that they needed to hide out. So they came to LFA and practiced on our field. The entire student body showed up to watch. The Bears were cockiness personified, and we loved it.

  Some of that cockiness must have rubbed off on me when I chose which colleges to apply to, because my list was preposterous: Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia, Stanford, Northwestern, and Brown. No safety schools. None.

  A feeling of worry was oozing through my brain when I ran into my girlfriend, Lyssa, in the hallway. What if I didn’t get into any schools? I asked her if she had any extra applications to . . . any schools at all.

  At her locker, she pulled out five clean applications. For two, the deadlines had passed, but for three others, Boston College, Boston University, and Colgate, I had until the next day. I filled them out, repurposed my Brown college essay, ran around begging for last-minute recommendations, and sent them off before the deadline.

  The only three schools I got into were Boston College, Boston University, and Colgate. Loaded with plenty of “good” Indians, the Ivy League had completely rejected this junky old B+ Indian.

  I had seen only the brochures for the three schools, so I was having a hard time making a decision. When Lyssa committed to Boston College, I started to lean toward there, but I put a pin in it for a few weeks to think.

  In March, I signed out three friends to my house, though we spent Friday night at Aaron’s place, downtown. Thanks to an inside source, Dean Rosen caught wind of our weekend sign-out scheme and tried to bust us. She called my parents at two A.M., waking them up and asking if we were, in fact, home.

  “Of course, and they’re sleeping,” my mother said. “Like I was before you woke me up.” Like Burt Reynolds, my mother has an anti-authority streak a mile wide.

  A week later, the school announced a room search. The routine went as follows: A room search was announced for the next evening. Next, whoever had anything illegal in their room waited for lights-out and then marched their beer or pot out to the woods, where they’d stow it under a pile of leaves. After the search, everyone would go back to the woods to gather up their stuff. You had to be an idiot to get caught. And yet it happened. A guy across the hall got busted with six empty Pabst beer cans under his bed.

  I never kept anything illegal in my room, because it just wasn’t worth the risk. During study hall, Aaron and I evacuated our room while two deans performed their search. When we got back to our room, everything looked undisturbed, except for a framed picture of an Indian god that my grandmother had given me when I was a baby. It lay there on my desk, with the glass, the picture, and the frame taken apart.

  Aaron looked at me. “Wow, kinda rude not to reassemble your picture of God!”

  The next morning, I arrived at Adviser Period to find the rest of the advisees filing out. Assuming it was canceled, I waved to Turansky and said, “See ya.”

  But he stopped me. “We have to go see Mr. Andrews.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  As we walked through the empty school hallway, my mind raced. What could they possibly have on me? Did one of the rehab narcs rat me out? That would be fitting.

  Outside Mr. Andrews’s office, Turansky nodded, sadly, and said, “We’ll talk later.”

  As I entered Mr. Andrews’s office, I looked up to see the secretary closing the drapes to the large glass windows. What the . . . ? Nobody survives the closing of the drapes. “Why are you closing the drapes?!” I blurted out, but she didn’t answer. Realizing I was in some major fucking trouble, I said, “What’s going on?”

 
; Like a Bond villain, Mr. Andrews swiveled his chair toward me, dramatically slapping a small folded piece of paper onto the desk. “Would you mind telling me what this is?!” I examined the folded paper. It was a small, handmade envelope, about two inches wide by an inch and a half high, and it was folded in exactly the same way as a snow seal (cocaine envelope) is. On the envelope was some Sanskrit writing. I looked up at him and smiled. Andrews didn’t know it yet, but I was about to checkmate him. “It’s vibhuti.”

  “What?!” he said, annoyed by my smirk. I opened the envelope. Inside was some whitish gray powder. To his shock, I dipped my pinky finger into the powder and licked it.

  Nearly jumping out of his chair, he yelped, “Don’t do that!” Did this kid really just taste cocaine in front of him?

  “What?” I said, innocently. “It’s Indian religious ash. It’s called vibhuti. You put it on your forehead during Hindu religious ceremonies. What did you think it was?”

  He was flustered and didn’t want to answer.

  I leaned back in my chair, cocky. “Where’d you find it? In the frame of that picture my grandmother gave me when I was a baby? The picture of Lakshmi, the Hindu god of prosperity?” I was getting pious now. Sure, I was a big-time Hindu. This was like game one of the 1995 basketball playoffs, when the New York Knicks were celebrating their six-point win over the Indiana Pacers before the game had actually ended. And then the assassin, Reggie Miller, scored eight points in the final nine seconds to pull off one of the most shocking comebacks in sports history. I was Reggie Miller. Mr. Andrews was the Knicks.

  He stammered, “We’re going to send that to the lab!”

  “Great! Send it!” I said gleefully. “Can’t wait to see the results.” It must have infuriated him to sit across from this glib little bastard in a coat and tie, so he tried to retake the advantage. “Well, you’re going to be suspended until we get the results back.”

  That was his second mistake. In history class, I had learned about a little something called the US Constitution, and I had a hunch that it was probably illegal to suspend me without evidence. Innocent until proven guilty, right? That said, it was a private school, and they had thrown out my friends without proof. I left his office, indignant. “This is bullshit!”